Waiting for the deluge

I don’t know about you, but I still get that frisson whenever I send out an e-mail newsletter.

I just now pressed the “Send” button for our Development Office’s fourth newsletter. Countless thousands of people will receive a mail I personally sent in their inboxes. Some of them won’t even read the mail because their spam filter will have intercepted it. Some of them will delete the mail outright. Some of them will give it a cursory glance and then delete it. Some of them will read it and actually click on the links.

[note to self: include table of contents next time, it’s become a little too unwieldy]

And then there will be the flood of e-mails back.

“Please remove me from you mailing list” and “Please note my e-mail has changed” and “Person X has been replaced by person Y, please change your database accordingly”. We haven’t received any “Why am I receiving this” or “Stop spamming me” since the very first newsletter, so that’s pretty good. To the contrary, we get “thank you for the interesting newsletter” and things.

And of course, we also get more than our share of “mailbox full” and “out of office” mails.

Which is what I’m now waiting for. Anxiously. Because the first “out of office” mail is a sign that the mailing has actually been delivered to people.

Yes, I know I could check the mail server, and I’ve been down to IT to do just that. But I don’t trust technology sometimes.

update 18:23 …aaand we have impact 🙂 The very first mail I received back:

Returned message. The size of sent message exceeds the max. spool size, 10.0MB, of X’s.Powered by 3R Soft, Inc.